Come to our Scratch dos this June

Pre-order Failed Summer Vacation from our online shop

Tomorrow - the 17th October - the truly unique Duets goes on sale... Eight stories each co-written by two authors. Featuring: Eley...

A dark, delicious, dreamy immersion in a much hotter way of living... 

Submissions are now open for the summer Scratch A4 until 25 May... ​ Enter your < 1000 word story for the Summer '24 event on Saturday...

Woah... that went quick! It was two years ago this month that Scratch Books published Reverse Engineering! To celebrate, we're offering...

Introduction by Darran Anderson One of the appeals of poetry is its ability to decelerate time until life appears as strange as it really...

Introduction by James Young I first read Machado de Assis in 2006, when the teacher of the Português Para Estrangeiros class at Paraíba...

Introduction by Carrie Beth Esposito 'Her Letters' by Kate Chopin tells the story of a woman unable to burn letters to and from her lover...

Introduction by Joshua Jones I often find a certain comfort in the depraved. Like shining a torch under the bed and having a good...

Introduction by Łukasz Drobnik Virginia Woolf’s “Monday or Tuesday”, the titular story from her 1921 collection, eludes categorisation....

Introduction by Aidan Cottrell-Boyce Roth wrote this story in 1933, soon after he and his partner – Andrea Manga Bell – had fled Germany...

Introduction by Jayson Carcione This was the summer Sicily burned, another summer of lives lost in a graveyard sea – and I keep going...

For all friends and family interested in how fiction works, buy 'em the Reverse Engineering books... At a special 30% off, all December!...

Introduction by Livi Michael ‘To Build a Fire’ Is a story about a man who sets out in the freezing Yukon winter, accompanied only by a...

Introduction by Jacqueline Doyle Edgar Allan Poe insisted that every great short story focuses on a “single effect,” and that every word...

Introduction by Cath Barton The Scottish novelist and playwright James Matthew Barrie was appointed a baronet by King George V in 1913....

Introduction by Chris Wright In his 1981 essay, Escaping from Belfast, V.S. Pritchett wrote at length about a forgotten Ulster writer by...

Introduction by Fiona McKay Many years ago, when I was in school, we had an anthology of short stories, Exploring English 1. It was my...

Introduction by Luca Serra I believe certain pieces of fiction find you when you most need it. This was the case for me with White...